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Dickens
His Parables, and His Reader
By Linda M. Lewis
University of Missouri Press
Copyright © 2011 The Curators of the University of Missouri
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8262-1947-3
Chapter One
The Child as Christian Pilgrim in
Oliver Twist and
The Old Curiosity Shop
It is no exaggeration to label Victorian sensibilities about infancy and youth a "cult of childhood." In Victorian literary works, for example, Jane Eyre suffers the terrors of the red-room, Maggie Tulliver attains peace only beneath floodwaters of the Floss, orphaned Heathcliff withstands vicious pummeling from the Earnshaw heir, and Smike is brutalized by Squeers at Dotheboys Hall. In addition to sentimental tableaux of suffering children, some texts advocate for tribes of wronged children, as Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby blows the whistle on Yorkshire boarding schools populated with wizened, underfed lads and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poem "The Cry of the Children" pleads for child laborers who "wee[p] in the playtime of the others/In the country of the free." Although Victorian children were exploited in mines, factories, and workhouses, literary Victorians felt a tender affection for fictional orphans and foundlings, ailing infants, and discarded and dying children.
In reality as in fiction, the mortality of infants and children was sadly high: when Dickens was writing Oliver Twist and The Old Curiosity Shop, the death rate for infants was 153 per thousand. At midcentury in Bath, one middle-class child in eleven died before the age of five, while in working-class homes, one child of every two died in the first five years. At Mr. Sowerberry's funeral emporium, the "children's practice" proves lucrative (OT 35), and Little Nell notices, "How many of the mounds in that old churchyard where she had lately strayed, grew green above the graves of children!" (OCS 198). Every family in every class had witnessed a child's death, if not in its own household, then in the neighborhood or among the relatives. Two of Dickens's younger siblings died as children; Charles and Catherine Dickens suffered the death of an infant, Dora, in 1851 and of a little nephew, Harry Burnett, in 1849; Dickens had too many occasions to send letters of condolence to friends who grieved for children. Most affecting to Dickens, however, was the 1837 death of his teenaged sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth, "the grace and light of our home" and his model for Little Nell Trent.
No Victorian novelist was more invested than Dickens in the cult of childhood. A fair number of his literary children were marked for premature and sentimental death: little Dick in Oliver Twist, Smike in Nicholas Nickleby, Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop, Paul in Dombey and Son, Jo in Bleak House, and Johnny in Our Mutual Friend. Others, like Oliver Twist, Tim Cratchit, David Copperfield, and Philip Pirrip, suffer grievously. Dickens's contemporary Robert Buchanan notes that the novelist "so loaded his soul" with his own childhood sorrows that he never in his perceptions grew any older than childhood. Further, James R. Kincaid says that Dickens is central to our concept of the child, a little being not only the object of our "sappy nostalgia or egotistical projection" but also of our "darker needs of desire and exploitation," the alien or other "written on by our longings." And Carolyn Steedman speculates that children were to Victorians the emblems of the adult condition and an avenue to adult interiority. Dickens himself says much the same thing: in a speech supporting a children's hospital, he recalls Charles Lamb's "Dream Children"—reminding one of "the dear child you love, the dearer child you have lost, the child you might have had, the child you certainly have been."
Leslie A. Fiedler, referring to the "invention" of the ubiquitous and symbolic child, notes that the New Testament is the source, that Renaissance art with its endless Madonnas and Sons promulgated the icon, and that the bourgeois and Protestant sentiment of nineteenth-century England and America which placed the child at the center of literary texts was a by-product of the shift from the belief in Original Sin to the belief in Original Innocence.
Certainly, Dickens was a believer in "Original Innocence": his infants arrive trailing clouds of glory, and should they die young, they are spared the indignity of becoming "old, wan, tearful, withered," and they ascend to a heaven where "[t]he angels all are children"6 Dickens's source for his child-as-exemplum motif is—as Fiedler notes—bourgeois, Protestant, and New Testament. In all three synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) children are brought to Jesus by their parents, only to have his disciples attempt to disperse them. But Jesus famously responds, "Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God" (Luke 18:16). Elsewhere he warns: "But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea" (Matt. 18:6)—the fate that (minus the millstone) befalls the devilish Quilp of The Old Curiosity Shop. Moreover, the warning is again quoted by Dickens in The Life of our Lord, written for the Dickens children in 1849; in "Barbox Brothers and Co." of the 1866 Mugby Junction stories, it motivates Jackson to forgive his jilting sweetheart and her dying husband once he meets their child, Polly.
Dickens's early child-centered novels, Oliver Twist; or, the Parish Boy's Progress (1837–39 in Bentley's Miscellany) and The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41 in Master Humphrey's Clock) helped to create Victorian readers' "horizon of expectations" in regard to fictional childhood. Written by an author still in his twenties, these works exalt youth over age and depict an odd allegory of child-as-pilgrim (odd in that Dickens's perfect, sinless child has never strayed from God). Both Oliver and Nell are spiritually precocious and naturally good. Both children take their cue from John Bunyan's questing sojourners in The Pilgrim's Progress, although only Nell Trent achieves the Celestial City, while Oliver Twist merely retires to a new Eden on earth. Barbara Hardy notes remarkable similarities between the children, including their juxtaposition with their elders: "We see Oliver and Nell ... isolated, wandering, often at night, in the unknown country or city, surrounded by the old, the knowing, the monstrous...." Hardy adds that both children are "given a reinforcement of Christian pastoral," which in Dickens is sometimes a surrogate religion. Against Hardy, I shall argue that the pastoral in Dickens is no surrogate for religion but an allegorical expression of it. Nevertheless, I contend that Dickens's quest paradigm would not have been totally successful because of the idealized perfection of his little pilgrims, for whom the reader no doubt felt sympathy but (considering his adult and "fallen" status) probably not self-identity.
Peter J. Rabinowitz accounts for a reader's method, which he calls the four "rules" for reading a text: rules of notice, rules of signification, rules of configuration, and rules of coherence. Notice refers to the reader's taking account of whatever stands out as most noticeable; signification is drawing conclusions about such items as symbols, allusions, and religious connotations, or unpacking the text; configuration means the mental act of aligning things that match, making them into meaningful patterns; coherence is reading a text so that it becomes the best text possible—collaborating with the author by performing such acts as transforming metaphors, disjuncture, and ironies into more cohesive systems. 9 The Rabinowitz method of "interpretation" offers a productive system to estimate the probable response of Dickens's ideal reader, who after all shared with Dickens the same Scriptures, the same Book of Common Prayer, the same catechism—although Dickens may well have had a better recall of the New Testament because he likely read it more attentively. But Dickens counted on his readers to notice the allusions, understand the nature of allegory, match important symbols, sense the narrator's tone, and recognize irony. Still he intended, as he says in The Old Curiosity Shop, to lead the reader by the hand.
The ideal reader of Oliver Twist should have noticed the foregrounding of Jesus' Good Samaritan parable as enacted by the model characters and may have noted that the parable is ironically parodied in the actions of those who "offend" children. The rules of configuration, however, would probably have been violated—in part because the prostitute Nancy, contrary to reader expectations, becomes the novel's greatest example of the Good Samaritan and because little Oliver's danger is never spiritual, but only physical. Dickens himself says that the "bill of fare" of The Old Curiosity Shop is allegory. The pilgrimage of young Nell and her elderly grandfather, in fact, functions as bi-level allegory: the two represent both youth versus age and soul versus body. Much criticism has written off Nell's story—especially her death—as a tasteless example of Victorian sentimentality. I contend that, although the novel is flawed, it is a bold attempt at a multivalent text. Granted, though, it requires the reader's labored use of the rules of coherence to maintain the two-level allegory throughout a reading of the tale. Nell is designed to be a counterpart of Bunyan's Christian—the first famous child pilgrim to follow the "strait" and narrow way to heaven. She is also intended to provide vicarious consolation for those left behind—especially readers who mourn the loss of a son or daughter, godchild, or grandchild. It is a large assignment for a little child.
Oliver Twist
I.
Oliver Twist is an example of what Fiedler calls "Original Innocence," and Dickens uses Oliver's melodramatic pilgrimage to pit evil against goodness, inviting the reader to jeer at evil and cheer when good prevails. K. J. Fielding, in fact, believes Oliver Twist to be "more purposefully religious" than any of Dickens's novels. Moreover, John Sullivan Dwight, reviewing the novel for The Christian Examiner in November 1839, notes that Dickens's outlook in Oliver Twist rests on healthy Christian faith and optimism. As Dwight notices, the little child is used to illustrate large-scale failure of the pledge of brotherhood. In the preface to the third edition, Dickens informs the reader that Oliver is not so much a character as he is an abstraction, "the principle of Good surviving through every adverse circumstance, and triumphing at last" (OT liii). As noted above, little Oliver is an incredibly precocious child. Not only is he linguistically gifted (earning the frequent criticism that he speaks Received English instead of workhouse dialect), but he also exhibits an inherent proclivity for religion. Although nobody in the social welfare system has taught him to pray, for example, he prays most earnestly for himself and for his benefactors. Oliver's precocity in moral development is noted by Rose Maylie, who says that the "Power" which has tried him beyond his years has also "planted in his breast affections and feelings which would do honour to many who have numbered his days six times over" (OT 331).
Secondary characters of the novel can be instantly and accurately gauged by their reaction to Oliver, as he is the spiritual yardstick for measuring "offense" to "these little ones." From the baby farm of Oliver's infancy to the cottage of near-perfect happiness where the reader leaves Oliver at the end of the novel, the characters whom the little hero meets in his pilgrimage either starve or feast him, praise or condemn him, attempt to defile or rescue him. To the despicable characters, Oliver is a "young dog" (OT 117, Sikes), "idle young ruffian" (OT 33, Claypole), "little un-grate-ful mur-der-ous hor-rid vil-lain!" (OT 47, Charlotte), "imp" and "pale-faced hound" (OT 260, 293, Monks), "young savage" (OT 49, the "gentleman" of the white waistcoat), "young devil" (OT 75, an officer), "hardened young rascal" (OT 29, the "gentlemen" who turn him over to Sowerberry), "hardened scoundrel" (OT 80, Fang), a "naughty orphan which nobody can't love" and "a millstone around the porochial throat" (OT 19, 27, Bumble, who misinterprets Jesus' words without realizing that the Beadle himself deserves the millstone and drowning fate). To the good characters or those worthy of redemption, Oliver is "an innocent and unoffending child" (OT 401, Brownlow, perhaps in a play of words on Jesus' warning to those who "offend" the "unoffending"), a "dear, grateful, gentle child" (OT 137, Mrs. Bedwin), a "child of a noble nature and a warm heart" (OT 331, Rose Maylie). Even Nancy, defiled from childhood by the criminal Fagin, accurately describes Oliver when—out to retrieve him for Fagin by posing as his sister—she laments loudly about a "poor, dear, sweet, innocent" lost brother (OT 98). The only exceptions to my observation that character is measured on the basis of response to the unoffending little orphan are the crusty Mr. Grimwig, who pretends that he dislikes all boys and proclaims Oliver as just one more of the mealy-faced tribe, and the devil Fagin, who sets out to corrupt the "poor leetle boy" (OT 153) while pretending to be his protector and friend.
Further, Dickens manipulates the rhetoric to elicit the reader's agreement with his outrage against those who defile the boy. The text is sprinkled with pronouncements that the narrator allegedly believes, but no right-thinking, sympathetic person could accept. For example, being born in the workhouse was for Oliver "the best thing that could ... by possibility have occurred" (OT 1), and the "tender laws of England" allow paupers to sleep (OT 10). Susan R. Horton says that the matter-of-fact narrator in Dickens's works provides no relief in the form of a moral voice, and the result is that the reader must "provide the outrage."
When the narrator abruptly changes strategy to speak against the system rather than for it, the reader easily makes the switch, probably without realizing that a change has been called for. An early example is when the narrator "wishes" that some well-fed philosopher with blood of ice and heart of iron could have seen Oliver making a meal on scraps that the dog would not eat; the only thing the narrator would prefer, he says, is seeing that Philosopher "making the same sort of meal himself, with the same relish" (OT 31). Here the narrator provides the outrage. This direct-attack satire is fierce and scathing, and the narrator—having won the reader's concurrence by the pathos of Oliver's dining—takes for granted that the reader would also relish the sight of the Philosopher with his muzzle in the dog's dish. Karín Lesnik-Obserstein, however, detects a problem in the narrator's speech in that he becomes one of the "philosophers"; she further notes that both goodness and childhood are characterized as silent. It is accurate to say that the welfare system and the thieves rob Oliver of his voice, but his benefactors restore it. Lesnik-Obserstein is quite correct, though, in observing that the narrator occasionally adopts the register of "pompous hypocrisy" he has allocated to parish officials.
Although the narrator's voice is an important rhetorical strategy, the narrator's parable is more significant to Dickens's Christian theme, depending as it does upon the reader's residue of memories of the sayings of Jesus (inculcated primarily in the church, the home, and the school during the reader's own youth). Rabinowitz's rules of signification grant special status to religious connotations, among other signifiers, but the configuration of these allusions around a central motif potentially compounds the effect of the rhetoric. Confident that his reader knows the parable of the Good Samaritan, Dickens uses it both for didactic motif and ironic mimicry. The novel's criminals and its functionaries of church and state systematically violate the parable or ironically invert it for evil purpose; the gentle folk are genuinely charitable to persons in need.
Jesus' parable, recorded in Luke's gospel (Luke 10:25–37), is prompted when a scholar of the Jewish law asks, "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" Jesus answers the question with another question: what does the Law say? The Torah scholar lists the first and second commandments as: loving the Lord "with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind" and loving one's neighbor as oneself. But the scholar, still unsatisfied, persists by asking, "And who is my neighbor?" He may expect a standard answer that included all Jews and proselytes. But this time the answer is given in the form of a parable that was to become one of Dickens's favorites. In Jesus' tale, a man going from Jerusalem to Jericho is stripped and beaten by robbers, who leave him to die. Two religious persons, a priest and a Levite, pass by the injured man, but neither bothers to tend his wounds—perhaps upon the excuse that a holy man would be defiled if he touched a corpse. But a Samaritan comes along, binds the man's wounds, places the victim on his own animal, takes him to an inn, pays for his care, and promises that the next time he passes that way, he will pay any extra costs incurred. Jesus then asks the Torah scholar which of the three has proven a neighbor to the man who "fell among the thieves" and upon hearing the correct answer, recommends, "Go, and do thou likewise."
The original hearers of the parable and the original readers of Luke's Gospel, knowing that Samaritans were considered apostates, would have been surprised by the unlikely hero. Prior to encountering this parable, one presumably did not feel compelled by custom to love a Samaritan—although, as Luise Schottroff points out, Jewish teaching insisted upon active compassion as expression of God's love. In his parable, then, Jesus reminds his auditors of something they presumably know. Further, his parable is consistent with his admonition to love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who persecute you (Matt. 5:44). Dickens—as is his usual practice—bases his morality on "lessons of our Saviour," although he prides himself that he "never made proclamation of this from the house tops" (and his Samaritans of the novel never boast of their goodness).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Dickens by Linda M. Lewis Copyright © 2011 by The Curators of the University of Missouri. Excerpted by permission of University of Missouri Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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